It doesn’t happen often, and I hope it never happens again, but the slim conservative majority on the Supreme Court let me down. I’m betting John Thompson of Louisiana feels the same way. The case was Connick v. Thompson. The Connick is one Harry Connick Sr., the retired district attorney for Orleans Parish. The Thompson is the ill-fated soul mentioned above. He spent 18 years in prison – 14 of them on death row – for the murder of a hotel executive.
Before he was convicted of the murder, he was convicted of attempted armed robbery. The aggravating circumstance of the armed robbery was enough to get Thompson sent to death row.
But a funny thing happened along Thompson’s road down the green mile. Actually, a number of funny things. Shortly before his scheduled execution date in 1999, an investigator for an organization called the Center for Equal Justice (it was the Louisiana Capital Defense Project in 1999) went through police files and discovered that blood on the pants of one of the armed robbery victims, blood that was the perpetrator’s, was type B.
Thompson is type O. Prosecutors withheld that evidence from Thompson’s defense team. His death sentence was commuted to life in prison. A judge ordered that Thompson be given a new trial on the murder charge.
His attorneys learned that prosecutors had withheld crucial eyewitness testimony in that case as well, according to news reports. (According to an in-depth, seven-page report on Thompson’s case in Mother Jones magazine, some prosecution witnesses got either cash or plea bargains for their testimony in the first murder case.)
Thompson was acquitted in his second murder trial, which made him a free man. But Thompson is the funny kind of guy who believes prosecutors shouldn’t get off scot-free when they withhold evidence. He sued Connick and the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. A jury awarded him $14 million.
I don’t blame him a bit, because I’m the same funny kind of guy who believes prosecutors should be held accountable when they hide or withhold evidence.
Nothing infuriates me more than prosecutors who commit Brady violations, the withholding of exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision that struck down the $14 million judgment, obviously thinks Brady violations are no big deal. So do his conservative cohorts: Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Connick had not been “deliberately indifferent,” Thomas reasoned, in training, monitoring or supervising his assistant district attorneys about Brady violations. The Thompson case was just a “single incident in which mistakes were made,” according to Los Angeles Times reporter David G. Savage’s story about the ruling.
And your point would be what, Justice Thomas? One Brady violation by a district attorney’s office is one too many, especially if it’s one that sent a man to death row. District attorneys are supposed to enforce and uphold the law.
When they commit Brady violations, they are breaking the law. When they do, they need to be held accountable.
Frankly, I’d like to see prosecutors who commit Brady violation sent to jail, right along side some of the miscreants they’ve convicted. That will never happen, but the least we can do is make district attorneys offices pay through the nose when they’re caught with their Brady rule pants down.
According to the Mother Jones story, Orleans Parish prosecutors claimed the $14 million would bankrupt their office. That’s not Thompson’s problem. Prosecutors should have thought of that before they committed the Brady violations.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
